


reflective surfaces

by pensee



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: College student Randall, Doctor/Patient Relationship, Gen, M/M, No Sex, Randall has sexual fantasies, Randall’s species dysphoria, Violence, non-linear storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:09:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensee/pseuds/pensee
Summary: Randall Tier never felt like he had been born in the right skin. Being with Doctor Lecter makes him feel just a little bit more right with himself.





	reflective surfaces

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daddyhanni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daddyhanni/gifts).

> This is all your fault daddyhanni. I hope you know that.

Randall doesn’t want to remember much of his senior year in high school, although his classmates apparently want to remember it for him, sending passive-aggressive bcc e-mails about their one year reunion—what kind of people have a class reunion after one year?—because they think it’s so fucking funny. Stuff like, “bring a bite guard when you RSVP, dog boy” and “haha bet you feel lucky you’re not in prison for biting her so badly, freak.”

Yeah, Randall doesn’t want to remember a lot about the life he’s tried to leave behind, but just like the body he was born into, he hasn’t got much of a choice. 

Mom calls him in the middle of intro to physics, and he hits the ‘ignore’ button on his phone a second too late, a hundred pairs of eyes, including the professor’s, latching onto him immediately at the noise as if they’re sharks excited at the scent of blood. 

Swallowing and trying not to turn red, Randall hurriedly texts her back one-handed after receiving her plaintive, “How’s things going?” message not seconds after he ignores her call.

“Fine,” he types, and considers turning his phone off entirely, though his thumb accidentally slips to the contacts button that displays his favorites, and he pauses.

“Doc” the first contact reads, a number he’s memorized by heart, stared at in the middle of the night and contemplated calling or texting more than once (more than once? More than a thousand times).

Doctor Lecter had come for him, that awful day during senior year, within the hour of his mother’s panicked call that the school had gotten ahold of her to say they would be calling the police because her son had “caused quite a disturbance in chemistry lab.” 

A disturbance. Randall can laugh about that now. 

His lab partner had been nice to him all semester, had been the first one not to flinch when they got alphabetically paired together at the same bench. She was an exchange student from a foreign country that had traveled to three continents more than Randall could ever dream of traveling to, and she’d been nice.

Until he overheard her in the hall talking to one of the other girls about how strange he was, how entirely sad it was to be such a loner that never really got along with anyone.

He’d fantasized, for days after first hearing that, what it would be like to have claws, to rip and split and tear with them to make the terrible tightness in his chest go away.

He had not tried to conceal the fact that he felt he wanted to wear a different skin most days, but he did not openly parade it around for his peers to ridicule either. 

That day in lab, something changed. 

His partner had accidentally spilt a beaker containing a weak acid solution onto his shirt, and when the teacher had told him to be careful wringing it out in the sink, to use plenty of water, his partner had looked at him with so much pity in her eyes, a meaningless apology on her lips. And he leapt on her, then, quickly as a fox lunges for a rabbit, getting his teeth an inch deep into her shoulder before anyone could stop him.

She’d moved at the last second, and he’d just missed her neck. 

The teacher had grabbed for him, but he wouldn’t let go, and then a security guard was wrestling him off, and he could hear phone calls being made, his classmates whispering, amusement and disappointment (the show had been over so quickly) in their voices too. He’d wondered, nonsensically, what was going to happen next, until someone shoved a flip phone into his hand and ordered him to talk to his mother.

“Can you hear me, baby? I’m meeting with the department chair right now, I can’t get out of it, but I called Doctor Lecter, he’s gonna come help you, okay?”

It was not unusual that his mother, a busy associate professor at a nearby university, did not always have time to drop everything and address what she called his “unique needs”, but all he heard out of her rambling was the one name he’d wanted to hear. 

A year later, sitting in a college science class and still having to deal with his mother’s same-old detached concern, he thinks of all the time Doctor Lecter had spent with him that day. 

How he had somehow convinced the school not to call the police. Calming his lab partner, applying a compress to her neck until she’d somehow gotten to the hospital. Either frightened her or appealed to her sympathy for Randall not to press charges. 

Hours after the incident, he’d driven Randall to his office, given him a meal that he’d apparently intended to be his own late night snack, and sat there doing insurance paperwork until it was nearly ten o’clock and Randall’s mother had left seven frantic messages that went unanswered. 

“I already called her and told her where you are, but she wants to hear it from you,” Doctor Lecter had said, without looking up from a folder an inch thick with insurance bylaws, while Randall had shut his phone off. 

“I don’t want to talk to her. I want to talk to you,” Randall had hummed, tracing the lines of the ceiling, the curves of every book on the top floor, furtively studying the stark veins on his psychiatrists hands with a wondering eye, musing about why a man who had a job with such a lack of physicality nonetheless seemed so fit. 

“Don’t underestimate the value of silence, Randall,” Doctor Lecter had told him. “Sometimes, it’s when we are silent with ourselves that we come to valuable conclusions about our behavior and about how to move forward.”

How do I want to move forward? Randall had thought. Not once in this very long day had Doctor Lecter ever questioned why he did what he did. Never once had he shamed him for committing what everyone else considered a very violent and very unjustified act. 

He had merely set him back on his feet, heedless of Randall’s bloody, dripping mouth staining ugly patterns onto his coat, put Randall in his car and fed and entertained him till the late hours of the night. 

It almost felt like being taken care of, freakishly intimate in a way that Randall did not know what to do with, and he had bitten his tongue at the memory of the meal he had consumed with gusto, the meat of it gamey and savory and the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted.

The protein wasn’t fish, cow, or pig—not any kind he’d ever tasted before, at least—and he couldn’t have put a finger on what it was, only that it was practically divine. 

Hand poised over his phone now, Randall shifts it so he can type with two hands, composing a new message to Doctor Lecter.

I need you, it says, and he scowls at himself before deleting the whole thing. He’d gone off to college in another state; his psychiatrist couldn’t get to him within the hour the way things were now. Besides, he’d been discharged from therapy a month before he graduated. 

His behavior had stabilized. Mom had been pleased his “unusual behaviors” were sorting themselves out. (What she did not know—that he occasionally took the car out to abandoned industrial parks and ran about mostly naked, on all fours, his voice screamed hoarse in an animal’s wordless roar—would not hurt her. That he was harboring a sick, unhealthy attachment to his therapist would not hurt her if she chose not to see it, just like she chose not to see everything else.) 

I need you, he types again, and this time, the message sends. 

As an animal, frolicking about in the moonlight, free and finally existing the way he was meant to, he’d always felt more bloodlust than lust of any kind of a sexual nature, but a few weeks before his therapy officially ended, something changed in him again. 

He’d caught Doctor Lecter’s secretary trying to get fresh with him near the bookcase, and thought, not for the first time, about what it would feel like if he once more allowed himself the opportunity to hold something by the neck. If his teeth were just a bit sharper and he held on for a bit longer, what would that be like? What would it be like to bite down on this woman’s neck, the woman who’d buzzed him in for his appointments for the past two years?

He’d forgotten a novel he’d been reading for English class on Doctor Lecter’s big desk, and had attempted to re-enter the office through the patient exit, had seen through a crack in the door Doctor Lecter’s secretary, smiling at him and batting her eyelashes.

She’d gone up on tiptoe to kiss him, and Randall had seen red. 

The kiss had ended not a moment later, Doctor Lecter’s smile kind but false, eyes hard and dark as flint as he told her in a low voice to go home. 

His hand on her shoulder was firm, and Randall could tell, with a zing of delight, that she was discomfited by his insistence, if not also at his strength. 

Doctor Lecter watched her leave, and only then did he say, “You don’t need to hide anymore, Randall.” 

“How did you know I was here?”

“Teenage boys do not tend to tread lightly,” Doctor Lecter had smiled, really now, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “And your scent is very characteristic. Fresh, but musky. You don’t try to distract from it by wearing those body sprays most people your age are so fascinated by.” 

Randall had absorbed the words with a half-open mouth, realizing he’d been scented the way a wolf would, tracking things through the bounds of its territory, and he had shivered. 

Are you a monster like me? he’d nearly gasped in that moment, although he knew it was probably more of a genetic abnormality than a true animalistic bent that allowed the Doctor to identify him by the way he smelled alone. 

But maybe you are, he’d thought, when the Doctor walked up to him on silent feet, still smiling, and Randall felt the instinctive reflex to back away, a hypnotized prey animal cowering before a lion. 

“Did you need something, Randall?” he’d asked, and Randall had to choke down on his plethora of impossible replies.

That night, Randall had retreated to his room early, pounded upstairs with the single-mindedness of an animal in rut, though how he touched himself was more reminiscent of a receptive partner in heat than any attempt to create an outlandish display of his strength or virility. 

Animals had no shame when they spread their legs or arched their backs, asses up for breeding while a crowd of spectators of the same species looked on, and Randall imagined eyes on him—Doctor Lecter’s strange red eyes—while he touched himself stupid, tugging at his cock while inching the tips of two fingers around the rim of his hole, drooling. Mouth panting, “Hannibal, Hannibal...” as he burned hot and saw stars and waited desperately for a mounting that would never come. 

Randall taps his pencil on the corner of his textbook while his stupid roommate turns up his wailing New Age soundtrack even louder. 

They’d gotten along during their first week together, but it’d all gone downhill from there. 

His phone vibrates, so vociferously it nearly falls off the bed, and his roommate goes, “Dude, you mind?I’m tryna relax here. No tech zone,” while Randall considers jabbing the pencil he’s holding into the other guy’s eye. 

He doesn’t even look before he answers, which is why he’s expecting an English classmate or his mother on the other end of the line. Still doesn’t excuse his rudeness, but it’s too late to take it back now.

“What,” he snaps, and receives a dry, “You were the one who contacted me, Randall,” in return. 

Oh. My—. Jesus wept.

“Christ, I’m sorry, doc,” he says, retreating from the room with a glare at the stupid CD player blocking his way. 

The hall isn’t much quieter but there are people milling around and not paying attention to him enough to micromanage his behavior, so he’ll take it. 

“I thought you were someone else.”

“Having trouble adjusting to college life?”

His tone is teasing instead of patronizing or scolding, and Randall lets out a breath he didn’t want to admit he was holding. 

“It’s—Well. You probably know how it is. I, I know you’re not on the clock right now, so I’ll try to keep it short.”

I’ll only waste a few hours of your time, no big deal, Randall thinks, starting to gnaw at his nails before he remembers that Doctor Lecter was the one who got him to stop that in the first place. 

“You’re not my patient anymore, but I can always find time for friends,” Doctor Lecter says, and Randall catches the whine that wants to come out of the back of his throat before his phone can catch it. 

Accomplishments so far: studying pre-engineering, managed to stay out of prison for severely biting a classmate a year ago, made friends with my former therapist. 

Gross, Randall thinks, but he can’t deny how his hand reflexively drifts to his inner thigh, hearing Doctor Lecter’s voice over the phone after so long. 

The very fact that Doctor Lecter kept him on caller ID—wasn’t surprised to hear from him—had to mean something, didn’t it?

Or was that just wishful thinking? 

“It’s weird, hearing you call me that,” Randall manages after a moment, fingers rubbing circles along his inner thigh. 

A bouncy blonde coed knocks his calf as she walks over him to get to a room down the hall, but he ignores her, gone boneless and happy at the faint sound of Hannibal’s breathing, the roughness of his tone, unnaturally amplified over the line. 

“I’d never seen a case like yours. I don’t think it’s odd to wish to ingratiate myself to you, in order to interact with you in your natural habitat,” Doctor Lecter says, and Randall should be offended—he’s treating you like some experimental subject!—but he’s too blissed out by the words “natural habitat”, the mental image of Doctor Lecter stalking him through the underbrush somewhere, like a big cat hunting a wayward cub. 

“In all seriousness, I would like to consider us friends.”

Randall whimpers softly, heel of his hand rubbing in minute motions over the half-erection that’s formed in his jeans. 

“Me too, doc,” he says breathlessly, gearing up for such a long night after he hangs up the phone. “Me too.” 

**Author's Note:**

> If someone can convince me to write the actual smut I may do it later.
> 
> @penseeart on Twitter for more Hannibal stuff


End file.
